The Charlotte News

Monday, March 11, 1957

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Cairo that U.N. salvage teams had moved into position this date for the job of removing the last two obstructions from the Suez Canal, which, provided the Egyptians gave their approval the following day, could be cleared in less than a month, opening the canal to ships of maximum draft and tonnage almost a month ahead of schedule. The general in charge of the U.N. operations had dropped his concept of clearing the canal in phases, with May 1 being the total clearance date. The Egyptians had slowed the work on some obstructions while permitting full-scale work on others, but the overall canal clearance was far ahead of schedule. A major problem would be dredging, as most of the canal's dredging equipment had been lost. Since the canal had been closed the previous November, there had been little silting, but as soon as heavy ships started moving, heavy silting would begin. Phase one would have ended with clearance of the Edgar Bonnet, permitting 10,000-ton ships to transit the 103-mile long waterway. That had been delayed as the Bonnet and another ship needed to be cleared at the same time to permit ships of maximum tonnage to pass through sometime in the ensuing month. The Bonnet virtually blocked the channel near the midpoint at Ismailia, and the other ship had sunk four miles from the southern end of the canal. In Port Said harbor at the northern terminus of the canal, there were four wrecks slated to be lifted by the time the Bonnet and the other ship were removed, by which time, adequate repairs would have been made on workshops, communications and lighting to permit full operation of the canal. Three dredgers were working at present and U.N. officials had said that a considerable number of foreign dredging firms would probably have to be hired. But the political problems associated with the canal remained. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser said in a newspaper interview that he was not sure whether he would abide by any World Court ruling which would permit Israeli ships to pass through the canal and the Gulf of Aqaba. His views had appeared in a Cairo newspaper as Israel had announced, via a statement signed by Foreign Minister Golda Meir, that it would ignore any World Court decisions on cases brought up by the Arab states. The interview with President Nasser conflicted with earlier reports that Egypt would be willing to allow the international tribunal to decide whether the Tiran Strait and Gulf of Aqaba were international or territorial waters, thus deciding whether Israel had a right of access to the southern Israeli port of Eilat. Egyptian officials had said that Israeli shipping would not be allowed through the Suez Canal because Egypt technically was still at war with Israel, as the 1888 Suez Canal convention permitted the country controlling the waterway to close it to its enemies. The claim by Egypt that the Tiran Strait was Egyptian territorial water might soon be tested at the World Court.

Egypt had also announced this date, through its information director, that it had protested to U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold the use of gunfire by U.N. forces to break up demonstrations by Gaza Strip residents. Hundreds of Arabs had demonstrated in Gaza the previous day in favor of return of an Egyptian administration. A temporary U.N.-sponsored administration was being set up in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal of its forces the previous week. Earlier, Cairo Radio had reported that violent demonstrations were continuing in Gaza, demanding an Egyptian administration. The information director announced also that Egypt had appointed General Hassan Abdel Latif as governor of Gaza and that he would take over his duties immediately. The information director said that Egypt had agreed that the U.N. emergency force could enter Gaza only for the specific purposes of preserving a cease-fire and observing the withdrawal of Israeli troops behind the armistice lines, that any other task being carried out by the U.N. Emergency Force would be refused by Egypt. The U.N. had set up its own civil administration in Gaza, with a colonel from Denmark being named the military governor. Cairo Radio carried broadcasts of the demonstrations, during which shouts of "We Want Egypt" and "Long Live Nasser, hero of Arabism", could be heard. Major General E. L. M. Burns, the UNEF commander, and Dr. Ralph Bunche, Undersecretary of the U.N., were in Gaza at present on an inspection tour.

The Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence within the Teamsters Union prepared this date to subpoena Teamsters president Dave Beck and to seize his financial records unless he agreed quickly to be cooperative. Mr. Beck had indicated that he would comply with their request before being subpoenaed. He had returned from Europe the previous day, dodging reporters in New York and refusing to be interviewed in Chicago, flying to his home in Seattle. During the previous two weeks, the Committee had received testimony that West Coast Teamster officials had been linked with underworld figures and some public officials in efforts to take over the profits from vice and gambling operations in the Portland, Ore., area. The hearings were in recess until the following day. The Committee had said that it wanted to question Mr. Beck about charges that Teamsters funds had been used to pay some of his personal bills and regarding activities of some of his underlings. Committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy said that he hoped Mr. Beck would take prompt steps to turn over his personal financial records to the Committee, that they had asked for them weeks earlier and he had never replied. Meanwhile, Portland Mayor Terry Schrunk was due to take a lie detector test administered by the Secret Service, to check whether his denial that he had once accepted a bribe from a gambling club owner in Portland during the course of a raid which he had conducted as Sheriff in September, 1955, was truthful. He had agreed to take the test the previous Friday after declaring that the testimony supporting his taking of the $500 bribe was "fantastic", that testimony having included statements by two Sheriff's deputies and a third, independent witness, who had shown up to interview for a job at the club, that they saw Mr. Schrunk pick up an envelope located behind a pole next to a water fountain, other testimony having established that Clifford Bennett, the operator of the club, was observed depositing $500 into the envelope and depositing it behind the pole in question, Mr. Schrunk having testified to the Committee that he might have stopped to take a drink at the fountain, denying, however, that he picked up an envelope. The Committee hoped to finish the Portland phase of its work during the current week and then turn to other situations.

Incidentally, while on the topic, we should point out that Klein's is an anagram for the surname Elkins. The primary witness linking Portland racketeering with the Teamsters was admitted racketeer James Elkins, thus the first of many witnesses brought before the Committee through time linking the Teamsters, and ultimately Jimmy Hoffa, with racketeering and illegal use of Teamster pension fund money with no-interest loans to racketeers and organized crime in exchange for kickbacks from gambling operations. Mr. Elkins testified the previous week that he had paid between $312 and $314 out of the profits of the night club, in which he had invested with Clifford Bennett, to the campaign operatives of Mr. Schrunk as protection money for the illegal gambling operations ongoing there, but that it was deemed not enough, hence the raid of September 11, 1955 by Sheriff Schrunk, who ultimately as Mayor was indicted and acquitted the following June of perjury before the grand jury regarding the bribery allegation, after Robert Kennedy had testified against him during the trial based on his investigation of the case while counsel for the McClellan Committee—which generally followed the indictment and testimonial pattern of the Alger Hiss case in 1948, with then-Congressman Richard Nixon, based on his membership of HUAC, having testified before the grand jury against Mr. Hiss for alleged perjury regarding his interaction with admitted Communist courier Whittaker Chambers in that case. Klein's Sporting Goods was the Chicago establishment from which, according to the Warren Commission in 1964, Lee Oswald ordered the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle allegedly used to assassinate President Kennedy in 1963, ordered under the name A. J. Hidell, mailed to a post office box in Dallas. Alek J. Hidell was an alias used by Mr. Oswald, according to the Warren Commission, appearing on a Selective Service classification card found in his wallet along with a Marines discharge card under the same name with his picture attached. Alek J. Hidell is a loose anagram for Jekyll-Hyde, if misspelling the unraveled anagrammatic rendering as L. Jekall-Hide or some variant thereof, or simply sounding it out without paying much attention to the spelling, hiding one ell as it were, L being the 12th letter of the alphabet, and not forgetting that the address of the Texas School Book Depository was 411 Elm Street, a building owned by D. Harold Byrd, cousin of Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, who had received unpledged electoral votes from Mississippi and Alabama, plus one "faithless" electoral vote from Oklahoma for the presidency in 1960. Mr. Oswald was said to be dyslexic, often misspelling words. ORTSAC, "Castro" in reverse, was the Pentagon code name for an exercise, eventually cancelled, involving liberation of an island near Puerto Rico, "Ortsac" being the name of the fictitious dictator of the island, scheduled to occur in October, 1962, as it turned out, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ultimate outcome of which led to the downfall from power in 1964 of Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. And, of course, for some odd reason, Clare Boothe Luce, in Life, had some extraordinarily prescient insight regarding the situation, over two weeks before the CIA alerted the Kennedy Administration, on October 15, 1962, of U-2 air reconnaissance photographs, taken October 14, of the construction of medium range ballistic missile launchers on Cuba. Add to that the fact that General Lyman L. Lemnitzer had, just two weeks prior to the Crisis, been transferred by President Kennedy from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, held since 1960, to supreme commander of NATO in Europe, thought to be the result of his approval in early 1961 of the leftover Eisenhower Administration's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, disastrous in its outcome that April, and his signing off on the Operation Northwoods program in early 1962, cancelled by President Kennedy as cuckoo, entailing proposed use of fake operatives posing as Communists or victims of Communist aggression to effect confusion in and around Cuba, as well as in American Southern cities, designed as a counter-intelligence operation against Communist infiltration and to discredit and destabilize the regime of Fidel Castro. Make of it what you will. The woods are dark and deep...

In Acapulco, Mexico, police had searched Acapulco Harbor this date for a floating body believed to be that of a wealthy Brooklyn widow, after she and a New York attorney had been slain and robbed after the attorney had put up a desperate fight for their lives. The body had been sighted shortly after midnight, but rough water and darkness had made its recovery before morning doubtful. The couple had disappeared on February 20, and police said that a tourist agent and an unemployed boatman had confessed to beating the couple to death during a nighttime boat ride, then robbing them of $70,000 in cash and jewelry, and dumping their weighted bodies from a boat into the sea. The two men who admitted to the crime had been taken out the previous day by police to the spot in the bay where they said they had dumped their victims, a mile or so offshore. Skin divers had searched fruitlessly for the two bodies, with their operations hampered by heavy undertow. The search was to be resumed this date with heavy diving equipment brought from Mexico City. The woman's jewels, or most of them, had been found hidden in the Acapulco garden of the brother-in-law of the tourist agent, who had attempted suicide by slashing his wrists with glass. Meanwhile, his accomplice talked freely with newsmen, giving an account which varied from his original version that both victims had succumbed to blows without resistance. He said that he had joined the tourist agent in the scheme because he did not make enough money to feed his family, working as a handyman for the tourist agent.

During the search for the bodies, an internationally known swimmer, Apolonio Castillo, had died early this date. He had gone down in Acapulco Bay the previous day to a depth of 280 feet to try to recover the bodies. He had an oxygen tank, but when he surfaced, he was unconscious with a severe case of the bends. He had been taken to a naval hospital and placed in a decompression chamber, but had succumbed. Firemen who were directing the effort to recover the bodies said that his oxygen tank apparently had been defective.

In Norfolk, Va., it was reported that a Coast Guard search plane this date had found two children missing in a small boat in Currituck Sound since mid-morning the previous day. They were apparently unharmed and were in a 16-foot boat sighted shortly before 9:00 a.m. just north of Corolla, N.C., about six miles across the sound from Morgan's Landing, their point of departure. A Coast Guard helicopter had dangled a rescue basket over the boat and hauled in the two children, ages 11 and 12. They appeared to have come through the night of near-freezing temperatures in good condition. The father of the two children had called the Coast Guard the previous night and reported them missing on a boat trip to Knotts Island in the northern area of Currituck Sound.

In Louisville, Ky., 31 persons had escaped serious injury the previous day when an Eastern Airlines plane had touched a runway, bounced 50 feet in the air, flipped over and then skidded 100 feet on its back. Only one passenger had been hospitalized and six others had been treated for minor cuts and bruises and released. One passenger said that the plane had come down hard, bounced and then veered toward a muddy field, that the next thing he knew, they were "upside down with a lot of runway going by in a hurry", and then they stopped. The plane's fuselage was battered but intact, its left wing having been ripped off and fragments strewn over a 150-foot area. The cause of the incident remained unknown. The three crew members refused to comment and the Civil Aeronautics Board was investigating. The pilot of the aircraft said that they were coming in on one runway and ended up on another runway. "That's the way it was." Fortunately, no one had a bomb.

In Raleigh, it was reported that Mecklenburg County State Representative Jack Love might find himself alone this night when the Mecklenburg delegation to the General Assembly caucused in Raleigh, the delegation being set to submit a bill during the week, with or without the signature of Mr. Love, calling for condemnation of property for the proposed new County Courthouse expansion. Mr. Love had bucked the delegation the previous week, saying that he would not go along with the bill. He was provided a week to think it over and unless he came up with an alternative, the rest of the delegation was planning to introduce the bill without Mr. Love's support.

Julian Scheer and Dick Young of The News report that that the formal entry of one candidate and the likely candidacies of two others would add interest to what had been dull speculation up to the present time regarding the municipal elections campaign. A local linen concern executive, who had many civic interests, was expected to make his formal announcement later in the week that he would enter the race for the City Council, and a well-known local insurance executive might reach a decision soon on entering the race, being urged to run by several prominent citizens. A third individual, a theater supply dealer who had been unsuccessful in an earlier campaign, had said this date that he was also considering a run. Jim Smith, member of the City Council and Mayor Pro Tem, had already announced that he would seek the mayoralty, being vacated by Philip Van Every after three terms. Mr. Smith's run would leave a vacant seat on the Council, with another possible vacancy also occurring.

In Ithaca, N.Y., it was reported that a whistling swan at Cornell University had been jilted, as one of the rare birds was being brought from Philadelphia for a mating but had escaped from its shipping crate while en route by rail.

A photograph shows the Rev. Bob Richards failing in an attempt to establish the world record in pole vaulting at 15 feet, nine inches, after having already broken the meet record at the Milwaukee games. He had brushed the bar and thus missed his goal, obviously not having had his regimen of Wheaties that morning. He was no champion. He let every child in the country down, with a faceful of sawdust.

On the editorial page, "The Small Print Masked a Challenge" indicates that UNC's Institute for Research in Social Science had reported during the week that the state again led the Southeast in population, with 4.45 million residents as of the beginning of 1957, a lead of 598,000 over Florida, the nearest competitor in the region. That placed the state 11th in population nationally, behind New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Indiana, with its 9.7 percent rate of growth being above the regional average.